


chasing after your restless heart

by hotmesslewis



Series: Lewis and Clark - Reincarnation [1]
Category: Lewis and Clark
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Bar Room Brawl, F/M, First Kiss, M/M, Minor Violence, Post-Teenage Angst, i can't believe there's already a tag for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 19:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11951433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmesslewis/pseuds/hotmesslewis
Summary: Part 1 of the Reincarnation series.  Meriwether Lewis gets into a bar fight and finds what he's been looking for.





	chasing after your restless heart

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, I'm not going to lie, this series is probably what I'm proudest of, even though it's this weird little AU in which all of the historical figures have been reincarnated and remember their pasts and everything. So, like, be gentle with me and my strange little baby here.

“I need to get out.” 

He said it quietly but desperately, his eyes darting around the bright yellow dining room, lingering on the doorways and windows with something like desire, his right foot kicking the leg of the table restlessly. A solemn look from the man at the other end of the table, eyes accusing him of making the dishes rattle, and he stopped kicking the leg of the table and took to kicking the leg of his chair instead.

Thomas Jefferson brought the garlic green bean speared on his fork to his mouth and chewed, slowly, diligently, before speaking. “So you say, Meriwether. So you always say.”

He resisted the urge to slump further into his seat by leaning forward, into the table, and impaling the piece of chicken before him on his fork. He brought it to eye level and examined it thoroughly, turning it to see it from all angles, before he noticed the harassed look on Mr. J’s face and lowered the chicken back to his plate.

Despite his famous appreciation of good food and his rather notorious appetite, Meriwether Lewis wasn’t hungry tonight.

It was just the pair of them having dinner that evening in the small-scale dining room in Mr. J’s recreated Monticello, somewhat wanting in the essence of the original house. But as far as Meriwether was concerned, they were in different worlds: Mr. J was here, secure in his self-made sanctuary, but Meriwether’s mind was out, rambling somewhere among the stars. He was resisting all the forces trying to pull him down to earth, including the lean, redheaded man across the table from him, upon whose hospitality he was currently relying. 

His body was rebelling against the neat, orderly confines of the house.

He needed to be outside.

He hated the pleading that worked its way into his voice, annoyingly childish. “But it’s true, sir!”

Mr. J sighed and poured himself another glass of wine. “True or not, Meriwether, you need to start considering your future. Seriously,” he clarified.

“I am considering my future.” He was slipping now into whining, and he hated himself doubly for that.

“Are you, sincerely? Have you thought about how you will spend the next twenty years of your life? The twenty beyond that? Or is your consideration of the future limited to whether you will be dining at my house or your mother’s in the coming week?”

Meriwether knew where this conversation was headed. It was the old, exhausted college discussion yet again—he would have considered it an argument, but arguing was not Mr. J’s style. He spoke slowly, softly, deliberately. Logically. 

No, the arguments came, loud and long, with Meriwether Lewis’s mother, Lucy Meriwether Lewis-Marks.

“I am thinking about college, Mr. J. And I do want to go to college, someday. Just not right now, not yet.”

“You said that you wanted to take a gap year, Meriwether. You’ve had two.”

Meriwether played with the cutlery and avoided Mr. J’s eyes.

“Your mother and I are worried about you. We understood one year, but this is getting excessive. You can only put off college for so long; at this point, you’ll probably have difficulty getting into the better schools. Your high school career was less than remarkable, after all, and these empty years of your ‘wanderings’ without even a steady job to show for them aren’t exactly doing you any favors—“

Meriwether stood abruptly from the table, barely catching the chair that almost fell over in his violent haste. “Thank you for your opinion, sir. I’m going out.”

Mr. J sighed with resignation. “To a bar, I suppose?”

Actually Meriwether had intended to go to a quiet spot he knew, out in his mother’s fields, and remake the constellations for his own pleasure. But Mr. J’s exasperation gave him the mind to be rebellious. “Yeah.”

“No, drinking, please. You are, still, underage, and I’d rather not have to come pick you up, or pay your bail. Your mother refuses to, you know, after the last time.”

Like hell, he wasn’t going to drink. He shrugged, noncommittal. Mr. J puckered his lips as if he’d just eaten a lemon whole.

When Meriwether reached the door, Mr. J spoke to him again. “I just have one more question, Meriwether.”

He turned back to look at Mr. J, still seated at the table and looking into his wine glass contemplatively. “Yes, sir?”

Mr. J addressed it, rather than the young man before him. “This . . . aimlessness of yours. Is it because of that boy?”

Meriwether just stared at him for a moment. Thomas Jefferson, the man he respected, the man he loved like a father, but the man that he knew to be the biggest liar in the world, who lied carefully, thoroughly, even, no, especially to himself. About his life; about his legacy; about the things he had done and the things he hadn’t. Yet Meriwether couldn’t bring himself to lie to the man. If Thomas Jefferson would be damned for his dishonesty, then Meriwether Lewis would be damned for his honesty.

“The rest of you have your lives, ready-made. All your important people are already here. And you all have each other, just like y’all did before. I . . . I have to find him.”

Mr. J nodded slowly, still staring into his red wine. He understood.

-

That boy.

That’s what Mr. J always called William Clark, despite the fact that Clark would now likely be well into adulthood.

God, did he want to find William Clark.

God, did he need to.

Meriwether Lewis thought as he drove the familiar road to Clancy’s, where they didn’t look at IDs too closely.

They were men and women out of time: himself, his mother, Mr. J, Mrs. J (while she had lived) and Sally Hemings. Alex Hamilton, Aaron Burr, their former wives and their children, the Adamses. And, he hoped, William Clark, though he had yet to find the man.

Men and women, living in the strange remnants of a country that they had tried to make in their own images, a country that had grown beyond them in their deaths. A country that had expanded, doubling, tripling in size in the absence of their watchful eyes; a country that had torn itself apart before putting itself together again, that found itself torn apart again and again, but always managed to put itself back together. Strange land that it was. A country that vilified their legacies and that deified them; a country that made them gods or devils—the fame or infamy that they had once craved. Perhaps Meriwether Lewis himself had once hoped to be this lauded figure, idolized by children the country over, his name and silhouette decorating signposts marking a trail across half the nation, but now?

Well, it wasn’t easy to grapple with your own legacy at the tender age of twenty, or so he told himself.

As a teenager, Meriwether had learned the truth about himself, about the men and women who surrounded him, and with his knowledge came a flood of memories, remembrances and mementoes of a life past. The perfectly lonely early mornings spent hunting, dew collecting on his skin and in his untamable hair as he watched the sun rise; long, lazy afternoons and evenings, rattling around in the empty president’s mansion as Mr. J’s secretary; but more than anything, memories of the Expedition. The land, the river in its ephemeral beauty, the native people and the animals and the plants. The frozen Bitterroots, the sweltering plains. His men, from young George Shannon to old Peter Cruzatte, crazy one-eyed Frenchman who accidently shot him in the ass, the Fields brothers, his sergeants, good men, Ordway, Gass, and Floyd, who died with them, their only loss.

He knew how his life ended, what he did. He knew how the gun felt pressed to his head, his chest; he knew how cool knife blade soothed his burning skin.

And more than anything: Clark. 

Always Clark.

Everyone else who was important to him, he merely remembered, but he dreamed of William Clark.

Meriwether didn’t care much for Aaron Burr (Mr. J joked that Meriwether Lewis’s prejudices held truer to the Republican tradition than his own did), but he remembered one night when Mr. Burr, slightly worse for his drink, came with some quarrel to Mr. J’s home and found himself confronting a surly sixteen year old Meriwether Lewis instead.

“We all have that somebody from our pasts, boy. That somebody who haunts us or, or kills us in some awful kind of way” (miraculously, Meriwether held his tongue at this point) “and the thing is, the horrible, shitty thing is, we’ve got to find them. We’ve got to find them and then we’ve got to live with them. It’s not enough to find them and then say you’re sorry and get on with it, boy, you’ve got to live every single goddamn day in this, this purgatory with your ghosts and your killers. Purgatory. Ha. More like hell itself.”

If Aaron Burr thought that was hell, then Meriwether Lewis couldn’t wait to be damned.

The suicide, making amends to the man he hurt the most.

That was how this life worked, it seemed.

He was strong, but, oh, it was so hard to die.

But he didn’t know if living could be any easier.

-

Clancy’s was kind of a dive, but they weren’t too particular about age, particularly for good customers. And at age twenty, Meriwether Lewis had already proven himself a good customer.

As the bartender poured a third glass of PBR, Meriwether surveyed the faces down the counter and considered: there was just something about this place that felt right. As if only good things could happen to him here, or maybe that was the beer talking, but he didn’t care. He took the glass graciously, and turned his back to lean against the bar and watch his fellow compatriots, brothers and sisters in booze, as they gracefully sank into the warm comfort of wood paneling and sweet mercy of cold beer around him.

Until his eye caught on the fire across the room, and the man that flaming hair belonged to, and his world ended and he spilled half his drink on the floor as he died on a bar stool.

He stood by the pool table. He was impossibly handsome, even more so when he smiled. Meriwether Lewis stared.

It had to be him.

God, he was perfect.

Except for the bottle-blonde woman by his elbow.

But Meriwether Lewis didn’t care about her, or anything else in the world for the moment. The man met his eyes (he had such perfect green-hazel eyes) and looked confused but smiled, and Meriwether dropped the remains of his glass back onto the bar and stumbled across the room toward this fascinating, perfect man.

But he made the mistake of stumbling into someone else first.

“Watch it, douchebag!”

“Sorry.” His apology was absent. His mind was absent. Perhaps it had gone on some kind of permanent vacation. Perhaps it had gotten lost in the wilderness. Perhaps he’d never had it to begin with.

“Like hell, you’re fucking sorry.”

The blonde woman placed her hand on the perfect man’s stomach in a familiar manner, and all Meriwether Lewis wanted to do was hit something. Hard.  
So he did. “I apologized, short dick, and I meant it. I am sorry. Mostly that you got in my way to begin with.”

What the hell. A bar fight could be fun, right?

Clancy’s was a terrible place, anyway. Only bad things happened to him here, he considered distantly, just as he mused on the wisdom of starting a fight with a man twice his weight (most of that seemingly muscle) surrounded by friends who neared his girth and embraced random violence against slight strangers. He also reflected on pain, particularly the pain one could experience as two men held one’s arms at peculiar angles behind one’s back as another pounded away at one’s ribs mercilessly, taking occasionally breaks to do some mild damage to one’s face instead.

But for all his contemplation, he still couldn’t seem to control what came out of his mouth. He could feel his eye swelling. He could feel the blood running from his nose down his upper lip as he grinned at his assailant. “I’m also sorry I slept with your mom.”

A few more punches and a poorly aimed kick of his own, and Meriwether felt the bodies being pulled away from his own, roughly. He collapsed to the floor and thought it felt very soft for cheap pine.

He was delusional. He was seeing things. The dumbass with the big fists hit harder than even he thought.

Because there was an angel with red hair leaning over him, kneeling by his side, looking down at him with evident concern. “Are you okay?” his delirious vision asked him.

“Are hallucinations part of, like, concussions?”

“I don’t think—”

“Because other than that I’m fine.” Meriwether stayed on the floor, but propped himself up on one elbow. He tried to smooth his perpetually unruly hair and grinned, only realized after the fact that his face was probably grotesque and his smile was coated in blood. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Somehow, this perfect man managed to make a greeting seem doubtful. Meriwether could see his brow clouding with confusion. “Have we met?”

Meriwether gave a bark of laughter. “Not yet, but we were just about to when all of that—” He indicated the fight coolly, with a wave of his hand.

The redhead frowned. “I’m Bill Clark.”

“Oh, God, yes. Yes you are.” Meriwether let his eyes run over the perplexed perfect man appreciatively for a moment before speaking again. “A pleasure to meet you. My name is Meriwether Lewis.”

And then he wrapped his hand around the back of the redhead’s perfect neck and drew those perfect lips to his own for the most perfect of kisses—sweet and soft, long as their lips lingered over each other’s and their breath mingled as their rhythms fell into sync. Meriwether Lewis kept his eyes closed as he released the man; he only opened them when Bill Clark spoke, two centuries later, and he tried to place when he was in time.

“The pleasure was mine.”


End file.
